Romeo & Juliet

This uneven production includes more of the text than do most productions, but it still omits many lines. Some of the omissions are well-judged abridgments of the tiresome banter between Romeo and his friends or between the servants and the musicians. Other deletions are much more dubious, as we're deprived of some great poetic lines. Some of the excisions in III.i (along with the staging of the sword fights in that scene) have the effect of presenting Tybalt as a less bellicose character than the full text suggests.

The best performances are those of Michael Hordern (Capulet), Celia Johnson (Nurse), Anthony Andrews (Mercutio), Alan Rickman (Tybalt), and Joseph O'Conor (Friar Laurence). None of those performances is impeccable, but each of them is at a high level.

Rebecca Saire (Juliet) is not up to the demands of her role in some of the crucial scenes in the first half of the play, but she improves considerably after a mediocre rendering of the "Gallop apace" soliloquy. Patrick Ryecart (Romeo) is excellent in the bedroom scene, but his performance otherwise ranges from poor in the early parts of the play to mediocre in the later parts. Ryecart too often substitutes expressionless reciting for acting. In the balcony scene he is unintentionally hilarious, as he keeps crashing to the ground after ascending a wall. Moreover, whereas Saire's physical appearance is just right for Juliet, Ryecart's physical appearance is unlikely to set aflutter the heart of any fourteen-year-old girl.

The sword fights are staged more impressively than in any of the other BBC Shakespeare productions, and the sets are generally well crafted. This production on the whole is pretty good, but it could have been excellent if the eponymous characters had been better portrayed.

Celia Johnson is good as the Nurse. Michael Hordern is good as Capulet, though it's his usual neighing and whinnying and not a patch on his King Lear. John O'Conor reads the verse well as Friar Laurence though he never takes it anywhere. Alan Rickman is good as Tybalt, in the first of his "yuk" roles that would make him famous. Christopher Strauli's Benvolio is sympathetic.

The sets are pretty, if not stunning as in some of the other BBC Shakespeare's.

And that's it. The rest is weak to dreadful. Rebecca Saire turned 15 during production, and hasn't a clue about how to act Juliet - she opens her eyes real wide and whines every line in exactly the same way. Patrick Ryecart is poorly matched to her, and his self-regard is inexplicable. The Balcony Scene flows smoothly and uneventfully with zero emotional or erotic impact. Their deaths come as a relief. If I had a dagger, I would have offered it to them hours earlier.

Anthony Andrews is unspeakable as Mercutio, a great shock if you remember his fine work in "Brideshead Revisited." He breaks the mirror of Shakespeare's verse into a thousand shards of two or three words each, and then shouts the fragments in as disconnected and unintelligible manner as possible. In this production, Queen Mab abdicates. Awful.

The director, Alvin Rakoff, shows only an intermittent gift of putting the camera where it will show us what we want to see. The opening brawl is notably incoherent. However there is humor when in a later fight, Romeo apparently knees Tybalt right in the cobblers. Tybalt then grabs the offended region. However did that get through?

R&J is a long play. This version is not recommended for classroom use, or much else.

I watched this in high school and thought it was okay, not great, a little over-acted, but okay. I am reviewing this because I just found out that Alan Rickman plays Tybalt in this. In my opinion Alan plays the role with gusto and power. Not over-acting like the other characters. God bless RickMAN. God bless you for saving this show. Too bad he had to die early...

Rebecca Saire and Patrick Ryecart and quite interesting as the leads. Saire gives a very good interpretation of Juliet and owns her scenes. She is beautiful, and her costumes are affective. Wearing clothing patterned after authentic period costumes adds a lot. She looks a little like Elsa Lanchester in "Bride of Frankenstein" in the heavy full-length dress of the day. Ryecart uses a more contemporary style, along the lines of England in the era of the Beatles and the Stones while remaining intellectually honest. It is unusual now to have a Romeo not be a teen-dream. Saire and Ryecart have some, not a lot of, chemistry. What the actors accomplish is to bring to the fore some of the questions in the plot. Why do they think springing their marriage on their families in the middle of a vendetta will not be received with horror? Or why doesn't Friar Lawrence see the likely outcome? They try to out-Machiavellian the rulers of a renaissance Italian city-state and the outcome is also predicable. The play is not the romantic tragedy it is reputed to be.

Perhaps the production values could have been better if it had not been filmed in the style of a 1970s BBC program. Too many crane shots. The sets are variable. Very good background music in the credits and the musicians in the party scene are playing authentic instruments.

This performance is from the first two seasons of BBC Shakespeare and is shows the original purpose which seemed to be to sell the package to school libraries from class discussion. Later they did more original interpretations of the plays and some of the actors in this are in the later plays; Ryecart, Michael Hordern, and Vernon Dobtcheff are the ones I saw.

At times I wasn't sure if this was Romeo and Juliet or Dudley Do-Right and Juliet. Sometimes Romeo seemed wooden, sometimes awkward, sometimes trying woodenly to be awkward. He seemed much older than Juliet, too, which would be interesting if it were part of the play but it isn't.

Much more affecting were Juliet herself, the Nurse, and old Capulet. Some of the staging was notably well handled, including the whole Capulet ballroom scene. I couldn't help comparing Mercutio and Friar Laurence unfavorably with their Zeffirelli counterparts.

It was nice to get more of the dialogue than some other film versions preserve, but on the other hand some of the cuts took away familiar lines and such cuts are always jarring.